Trauma – Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

There are many traumatised people walking around trying to experience the best out of their lives who have not understood that at some point in their life they have been traumatised. We call this a small ‘t’ trauma. Although there is nothing small about it. Small ‘t’ just mean not obvious.

A traumatic event can happen in an instant, for example, a car accident. It can also be a series of experiences over a long period of time such as with an abusive childhood or bullying at school. Or even in the womb.

Human beings have a brain that has built up over many years and has 4 main areas. A reptilian brain, a mammalian brain and a human brain divided into a left and right lobe. Fundamentally the brain is a pattern matching organ. It operates by recognising patterns as one event seems similar to another, it categories them together, and so it learns.

The unconscious (mammalian) mind where traumatic experiences can become trapped, actually activates in the womb when we are still only 22 weeks in gestation. Our emotional brain is actually switched on and operating at this time. If our mother has a very unpleasant or life threatening experience during her pregnancy then the baby will experience it too. From birth, looking into our mother’s eyes, programming takes place that is essential to our brains development. So if mother has had trauma during her life, she automatically passes it onto her baby. It will inevitably pass straight into the babies vulnerable, easily programmable, brain through their eye contact.

This phenomenon continues for the first two and a half years of life when the cognitive brain finally comes on stream. Up until then the child’s brain has no way of filtering, or making any sense of events around them. These memories are completely feeling based and we will have no cognitive or conscious awareness of them. All we know as adults is that we are struggling and can react in an unreasonable, unhelpful way in certain situations or relationships for no apparent reason.

When our brains perceive this threat is around us again, a small area known as the Amygdala switches on and it interacts with the Hippocampus. A memory store area, and a pattern match is triggered. This combination swamps the thinking logical brain. We then experience intensely unpleasant emotional arousal along with a need to get out of the situation as quickly as possible. We can also be triggered into an aggressive response or also, (although less often), a freeze response. The brain is attempting to de-traumatise itself but it can’t, it gets stuck, and although it settles down eventually, the trauma is waiting to be activated again.

In order to clear the trauma and restore normality the cognitive and emotional brains must be able to be active at the same time. Knowing cognitively what the original memory was is not particularly important.

Various techniques which can be performed over skype, by phone or face to face can be life changing in their ability to clear trauma from the mind.

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation Reprocessing) is NICE guideline approved therapy for trauma. It has been researched and perfected of the last 30 years and was developed by a Clinical Psychologist by the name of Francine Shapiro.

This treatment involves watching a moving object while connecting emotionally and cognitively with the traumatic event. This enables both sides of the brain to operate at the same time. Thereby, giving time for the cognitive brain to catch up with the mammalian brain and clear the traumatic event so it is no longer is able to swamp the brain in unpleasant emotions. In fact the event/experience/emotion changes into a harmless, unemotional memory.

Another widely used and effective method is the V/K dissociation technique or Re-wind technique. This technique involves helping the client to relax deeply while using guided imagery to guide them though processing the trauma and freeing the brain to react in a normal way to any future re-experiencing of similar situations.

Both of these therapies are also effective in changing our belief systems around ourselves and these events.

Trauma can be treated quickly and effectively through these or some other lesser known methods all of which are familiar and well practiced by myself.